Japanese American

Asian-Americans

...an indigestible mass in American society. The Chinese, earliest to arrive (in large numbers from the mid-19th century, principally as labourers, notably on the transcontinental railroad), and the Japanese were long victims of racial discrimination. In 1924 the law barred further entries; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. In 1942...

“Bad Day at Black Rock”

...including individual integrity, civic responsibility, and group paranoia and conformity. Bad Day at Black Rock was one of the earliest attempts in film to deal with the Japanese American experience during World War II and anti-Japanese prejudice in the postwar years.

California

Discrimination against the Japanese smoldered until World War II, when about 93,000 Japanese Americans lived in the state. Some three-fifths of them were American-born citizens known as Nisei (second-born); most of the others were Issei, older adults who had immigrated before Congress halted their influx in 1924. Never eligible for naturalization, the Issei were classed as enemy aliens during...

Japanese farmworkers were brought in to replace the Chinese, but as they grew successful the “yellow peril” outcry rose once again. Japanese agitation, focused largely in San Francisco, affected domestic and international policies. The Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States in 1907 halted further Japanese immigration to the United States. In 1913 the Webb Alien...

cancer rates

...incidence of and death rates for cancers among populations in different geographic regions. For example, prostate and colon cancer rates in Japanese persons living in Japan differ from the rates in Japanese persons who have emigrated to the United States, the rates of their offspring born in California, and the rates of long-term white residents of that state. These rates are much lower among...

Washington

...from the Midwest, and, until national quotas on foreign immigration were imposed in the 1920s, large numbers of foreign-born people entered the state, especially from Canada and Scandinavia. The Japanese arrived later and by 1930 numbered about 18,000. During World War II, citizens or not, they were moved from the coastal areas to relocation camps in inland regions. After the war only a few...

World War II incarceration

...Pearl Harbor had united the nation, few people were prosecuted for disloyalty or sedition, unlike during World War I. The one glaring exception to this policy was the scandalous treatment of Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent. In 1942, on the basis of groundless racial fears and suspicions, virtually the entire Japanese-American population of the West Coast, amounting to 110,000...

the forced relocation by the U.S. government of thousands of Japanese Americans to detention camps during World War II. That action was the culmination of the federal government’s long history of racist and discriminatory treatment of Asian immigrants and their descendants that had begun with restrictive immigration policies in the late 1800s.

Korematsu v. United States

case in which on Dec. 18, 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Fred Korematsu—a son of Japanese immigrants who was born in Oakland, Calif.—for having violated an exclusion order requiring him to submit to forced relocation during World War II.

Sun Valley

...long primarily an agriculture, trading, and supply centre, with some industrial development, including plastics, hosiery, and farm-machinery manufacturing. During World War II, a relocation camp for Japanese Americans was established on the plain north of Twin Falls; at its height it held more than 10,000 internees. In the 1990s the city’s growth was spurred in part by high-tech industry. The...